This IS your grandfather’s Wisconsin

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation has developed a media campaign designed to seduce urban millennials in Chicago into moving north. The basic premise is that this isn’t your grandfather’s Wisconsin, all evidence to the contrary.

The irony of Gov. Scott Walker’s WEDC promoting Madison and Milwaukee while the governor has built a political career out of playing our biggest cities off against the suburbs and rural areas has not been lost on a lot of people.

In fact, of the 21 images in a WEDC slideshow (found near the bottom of their website) nine are from Madison and nine are from Milwaukee. That leaves only three photos to represent the balance of the state. And one of those is just a picture of an Old Fashioned.

Yet last week when Madison’s mayor announced his candidacy for governor, Walker tweeted “The last thing we need is more Madison in our lives.”

I can explain the contradiction. The WEDC campaign is about using Madison as a lure to bring young, talented people to Wisconsin. The Walker tweet is about using Madison as a political wedge to fire up his base. This wouldn’t be the first time that a politician’s policy goals and his political instincts produced apparent hypocrisy, but it is one of the less subtle examples of that phenomenon.

More to the point, the ad campaign just won’t work. Young people in Chicago are in the big city for a lot reasons beyond just the fact that their jobs are there. They don’t just tolerate social diversity, they seek it out. Wisconsin is a state that has enacted voter identification laws designed to disenfranchise people of color and our state is run by politicians who, if they don't actively oppose gay marriage, accept it only grudgingly.

And it doesn’t stop there. Younger Americans overwhelmingly see global climate change as a threat to their futures. But Wisconsin is a state where state political leaders will not allow its Department of Natural Resources to so much as speak its name.

And then there’s the trains. Some of the WEDC ad campaign seems to be premised on the notion that millennials would rather spend time stuck in traffic on the Milwaukee freeway system or on the Madison Beltline than riding the El. But today one in four 19-year-olds do not have a driver’s license because driving just isn’t something they’re into. It apparently never occurred to the WEDC that there are people who actually would rather ride a train than drive a car.

Which brings me to my final point. Rather than wasting the public’s money on what’s likely to be a futile ad buy, the state would have done better by building a modern passenger rail system linking Chicago to Kenosha, Racine, Milwaukee and Madison. A seamless, easy rail connection between those four cities would have sent the message that Wisconsin gets it.

And it would have meant that 20- and 30-somethings could have worked in Chicago but lived across the border in less expensive and more pleasant surroundings. Eventually, as they moved into the family-forming period of life, they may have decided to start businesses or take jobs in Wisconsin. In that way, Wisconsin communities could have benefited from the dynamism of a world-class city. It would have been a symbiotic relationship rather than one in which Wisconsin tries to compete with Chicago, a game our state is almost certain to lose every time.

To make it all so much more painful, that rail system was just there for the taking. In 2010, then-Gov. Jim Doyle had secured $810 million in federal money to build just such a system. The feds would have paid for 100 percent of the construction costs and it was projected to be up and running by June 2013. Instead, Walker was elected and gave the money back before even taking the oath of office in January 2011.

His primary excuse for giving our own tax dollars back — so that they could be spent on the very same kind of project in places like Illinois and California — was that the state might have been on the hook for annual operating costs of around $7 million.

But Walker is so enthralled by the Chicago ad campaign that, before it has shown any results at all, he now wants to expand it to other cities at a cost of… wait for it… just under $7 million.

So, to sum up, a state where the official policy positions are to disenfranchise people of color, oppose equal rights for the LGBT community, deny climate change, and encourage driving over mass transit (while, by the way, letting the roads crumble) is seeking to attract a demographic that embraces diversity, is worried about a warming planet, and doesn’t particularly care about cars.

Comments (3)

Interstate Rail Not Enough - City-side system needed.

To compete in public transit, Madison needs to have a decent bus/rail system for getting around town.

It usually takes twice as long to get somewhere by bus than by car. I live on the west side of Madison, but work on the East. Public transit is out of the question.

The great part about Chicago's public transit is that it will take you anywhere - fast. Want to go to a Cubs game at Wrigley? Or go to the Art Institute? Or the Museum of Science and Industry? All while living in the suburbs? No problem.

The only part of Madison's public transit anybody brags about is the free bikes.

We can't blame Walker for this. It's always been this way.

Why hasn't Madison followed every other progressive city and created a great city-wide transit system?

Gabriel327 days ago

Right on!

Right on, Dave!

Debbie335 days ago

Well stated!

Dave C. You did a nice job of stating what one of Walker's problems has been - his closed "public " appearances never allow him to understand Wisconsite's concerns.

Ralph L Falcone Jr335 days ago

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